The Mirror

Will Politico get back in Nate Silver’s good graces?

Betsy Rothstein Gossip blogger
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Politico‘s year-end media list is “10 journalists to watch in 2014.” Not likely the point of it, but might there be a silver lining to producing such a list in terms of helping mend the butchered relationship between media writer Dylan Byers and ESPN’s Nate Silver?

Granted, Silver and his “New 538 Crew” rolled in at number 5. Still, can Silver go on despising Byers under these circumstances?

silver

The friction between the journalists began during the 2012 election when Byers wrote a post insisting that Silver’s reputation was in trouble and that he was a “one-term celebrity.”  Silver, then at NYT, wound up being right. But the damage between them was done. In December  of 2012, Silver told Out magazine that Byers was incompetent.

“I think he’s a terrible journalist,” Silver told Out, referring to an article in which Byers chastised BuzzFeed reporter Michael Hastings (now deceased) for his antagonistic approach to interviewing politicians. “Isn’t that the job of a journalist, to speak truth to power? The fact that this Dylan Byers guy saw that as problematic is a problem. We work in a world now where all these connections are so massaged; if you talk to someone in the State Department or the Obama campaign, you have to write three unquestioning fluff pieces for every real piece of information you get.”

Leading the entire Politico website this afternoon is the feature, with Silver front and center above the virtual fold.